CFA Society of Chicago hosted Joseph Scoby on Thursday, June 8th at the University Club to discuss how markets may be in the early days of a third disruption. Scoby is the Head of Magnetar’s Quantitative Investments Group which includes Alternative Risk Premia and Tactical Trading and brings 30 years of market experience in investments and risk management.
The three stages of disruption can be thought of as 1) active vs. passive in long-only portfolios 2) the advent of smart beta and 3) improving transparency for asset allocation. Scoby then gave three larger themed disruptions in society today, the Human Genome, Horizontal Fracking, and Big Data then expanded to a number of companies which have also disrupted their respective industries, Uber, Amazon, and Netflix. Similar to these aforementioned examples, technology in the market place has allowed managers to see what is going into returns and may be causing a secular change in how we invest.
Scoby gave us three levers of a portfolio 1) asset allocation 2) the manager and 3) cost. When viewing what our portfolio actually mimics, the speaker argued that we could be paying too much for each respective exposure which could lead to increased transparency over time. For example, the systematic return stream of hedge fund managers produced a 0.45 beta, which in the old days or ‘hood closed’ cost investors 2 and 20. Today, the ‘open era’ (transparent era), investor may begin to pay for each part; Alpha, Alternative Risk Premium, Smart Beta, and Beta with varying fees. One may pay 100 basis points for Alpha, but only 0-15 basis points for beta as the Vanguards of the world can replicate comparable results for rock-bottom costs.
The speaker went on to say how alpha is harder to find today given crowding of knowledge and process, as well as capacity issues, which makes cost and execution that much more important (differentiation is harder to find). Going forward, more transparent portfolios may also begin to use alternative risk exposure (return stream derived from exposure to a specific alternative asset class) as a way to differentiate one’s portfolio, and as a result, may earn their higher fees. An example given of alterative risk premium was merger arbitrage; 7% of deals break but most are priced as if 13% break – enabling 5.02% annualized returns with 6.88% volatility for his defined period.
Purchasing alternative risk premium isn’t straight forward, Scoby said, a few firms like Magnetar, AQR, and DFA offer it as well as a few ETF’s.